Here’s a slightly delayed write up for the 2 day Executive Roadshow event at the Crowne Palza, Birmingham.
Normally I’d try and blog live but sadly the Crowne Plaza regarded internet access in the hotel rooms (which I’d already paid for) as being something entirely different to wireless access in the rest of the hotel (for which I’d need to pay separately).
Continue reading “SirsiDynix Executive Roadshow, Birmingham, UK”
Tag: sirsidynix
HIP Tip: changing the timeout
This is in response to an email Anne Barnard posted to the Horizon-L mailing list:
I have my global settings session timeout set to 5 minutes, and my search timeout set to 2 minutes. I’m starting to get complaints from remote users that they timeout to quickly. How long are other libraries making their settings? We’re a public library and people frequently walk away without logging out.
I didn’t see anyplace where this could be set for profiles rather than globally.
Assuming that your public OPACs have a specific range of IP addresses allocated to them (e.g. you’ve set them up on their own subnet), then it’s possible to tweak the expiretimer.xsl to only use the timeout for those machines:
…the bits you need to add are shown in red, and you’ll need to amend the IP address accordingly.
If you need to check for multiple IP addresses, then simply expand that if statement, e.g.:
if(ip.indexOf(" 10.2.8")>0 || ip.indexOf(" 10.2.9")>0)
…will only run the timeout for IP addresses starting with 10.2.8.* and 10.2.9.*
There’s probably quite a few ways of achieving the above, so please let me know if you’ve got a simpler method!
The usual notes apply:
- this worked fine with HIP 3.04 UK, but may not work with any other release
- make sure you back the file up before editing
- try it on a test HIP installation first
A Room With a View
I’ve just arrived at the Crowne Plaza NEC Birmingham, ready for a meeting with Paul Miller at Talis first thing tomorrow morning, followed by the SirsiDynix Executive Roadshow 2006.
Travelling to Birmingham is never straightforward — today, due to a broken down train, they had to cram two sets of passengers onto a single train.
The Crowne Plaza is officially located in the middle of nowhere, about a mile from the National Exhibition Centre. Just in case there’s anyone reading this who’s planning to arrive tomorrow via train — get off at Birmingham International, walk straight through the NEC (you’ll see the occasional sign for the Plaza), and when you exit the NEC by the bus stops, you’ll be able to see the Plaza in the distance. The entrance to the hotel is actually on the other side, so you’ll need to skirt around the edge of the building.
I have a room with a view, but unfortunately it’s a view of a dull car park…
…and what is it with hotels and light switches? I seem to remember it took Bryony and me about 10 minutes to figure out how to switch the lights on in our hotel room at CODI 2005, and it took me even longer today.
When I walked into the room, none of the light switches would work. So, I read the guest information booklet twice (standing by the window as the light of the day faded), but there were no tips in there. Hmmmmm – should I swallow my pride and ring up the reception desk?
“Hi – Room 149 here… I have a question for you… How do I turn the lights on?!?”
Eventually I noticed that there was a strange box, hidden away in the shadows on the wall near the door. It says “TESA” on it and, according to Google and the Acronym Attic, TESA can stand for:
- Texas Educational Secretaries Association
- Texas Elks State Association
- The Endangered Species Act
- Teacher Education Student Association
- Theater Environmental Situational Awareness
- Testicular Epididymal Sperm Aspiration
…not much help there, although Google Images has an amusing picture that seems to be someone gaffa taped to a wall. Sadly, I couldn’t get the full sized version (http://www.pocsmadar.hu/miazmas/tesa.jpg) to load.
Anyway, on closer inspection, the box has a credit card sized slot in it… (gears begin to grind)… and my room door key is shaped like a credit card… eureka!
More Ajax goodness
I’ve spent the afternoon Ajax-ing the “did you mean?” code on the OPAC, and also finishing off the serendipity suggestions.
The serendipity suggestions take longer to generate than before, as the the code now considers keyword phrases returned by answers.com, instead of just single keywords. As an example, here’s what appears if I try searching for the film “Faraway, So Close” on our OPAC:
Obviously the suggestion of searching for “Close Faraday” is of little use. However, most of the serendipity suggestions are relevant to the film, and at least two of them will lead me straight through to the catalogue page for “Der Himmel über Berlin” (the prequel to “Faraway, So Close”).
One rather cool outcome of this is that our OPAC can now sometimes answer questions! Sadly the results don’t always lead to relevant items, but at least our OPAC knows the answer to the Ultimate Question!
Live OPAC search terms display
Another shameless hack inspired by the “Making Visible the Invisible” at SPL.
I’ve tweaked HIP to cache keyword search terms and then put together a couple of pages that display successful searches (in tasteful shades of purple and lilac) and failed searches (in gruesome greens).
IE has a nice CSS blur, so I’ve coupled that with Ajax to provide a constantly updating web page where new terms appear at the front and then drop slowly to the back, becoming more and more blurred and darker as they recede (click to view full size versions):
Curse you Superpatron!
It’s way past my bedtime, but the Ann Arbor Superpatron has been planting ideas in my head again…
Recently Checked Out Books feed (in RSS or otherwise)
I’ve not built a feed, but I have come up with these two representations of the most recent check outs (click for larger versions):
1) The last 30 covers to walk out the door…
2) Word Splat!…
…that particular splat is entitled “And Treacle Challenge Yorkshire” and is now on sale for only $395,000 (serious bidders only please!)
Word Splat! is made up of words from the titles of the most recent X number of check outs (where X is a roughly a handful).
I made a typo when initially coding the Word Splat!, and ended up with a random sub selection of words at the top left. I kinda like that, so whatever you get at the top left (if anything) is officially the title of that Splat!
update…
I’ve added three more book collages:
1) 30 Overdue Books
2) 30 Most Recent Requests
3) 30 Most Borrowed Books
The “Overdue Books” are a random selection of items that were due back on the previous day, but have yet to turn up.
A Perfect Library 2.0 Day
Just relaxing with a glass of wine after a very very Library 2.0 day 🙂
With a lot of help from Iman Moradi (blog/flickr), we ran an introduction to Library 2.0 for members of our Subject Teams and Tech Services this afternoon. Then, after a coffee break, we watched the SirsiDynix Institute Weblogs & Libraries: Communication, Conversation, and the Blog People web seminar given by Michael Stephens.
All in all, it’s given us a lot to discuss as we look towards (hopefully) implementing a Library Services or Computing & Library Services weblog. Fingers crossed that next week’s Library 2.0 Web Seminar will be as much fun. I’m keen to run into Stephen Abram at the upcoming SirsiDynix SuperConference in Birmingham as I want to find out what Library 2.0 things the company has in the pipeline — the API layer in the upcoming Horizon 8 release is defintely a welcome step in the right direction.
There was a lot of interest amongst staff in the new NCSU OPAC, especially as a lot of pioneering work on faceted searching was carried at here at Huddersfield by Amanda Tinker and Steve Pollit. I’m hoping that there might be potential for us to implement some of Amanda and Steve’s research into our OPAC.
We’ve also got a plateful of potential new features to unleash on our unsuspecting students — simple renewals via email, RSS feeds, keyword search alerts, “people who borrowed this…”, and more. I’m hoping to see if we can’t do some cool stuff with SMS as well.
2006 is already shaping up to be a busy year for the Library Systems Team — we’ll be involved in the RFID implementation and stock conversion (we’re currently out to tender on this) and we’re also implementing Talis Reading List. One thing I can’t stand is having nothing to do, so I’m not complaining 😀
I noticed Talis have stated that both John Blyberg and myself are developing these things purely for our own patrons/students. Whilst that’s true to an extent (after all, I work for Huddersfield not SirsiDynix), we’re both freely sharing much our code so that other Innovative and SirsiDynix customers can play around with it if they want to. Librarians have a long and proud tradition of sharing freely and I don’t intend to buck that trend just yet.
Speaking of which, I’ve been busy working on a Perl module to process the XML output from HIP 2.x/3.x and turn it into a simple Perl data structure. The XML output from HIP gives you pretty much all the information you need, but the structure is a little unwieldy. I’m hopeful the module will make it easier to quickly develop cool stuff like RSS feeds and OpenSearch interfaces from the OPAC. Once I’ve got the module finished (and posted on this site), I’ll also use it underpin the REST interface. In turn, that should make the REST code more manageable and I might be able to get that code to a stage where I’d be happy to make it available to the SirsiDynix community.
Unfortunately I’m currently suffering from a mild case of tendonitis in my right arm and hand, so I’m not doing as much coding as normal until it clears up. Still, as long as I can lift a glass of wine and snuggle up to Bry on the sofa in front of the TV, I’m happy 🙂
CODI 2005 – session links
I’ve put together a page listing each of the CODI 2005 sessions along with (hopefully!) all the PowerPoint, handout, podcast, blog, etc links.
http://www.daveyp.com/files/stuff/codi2005links.html
Please feel free to re-use the link or to circulate it.
If you have any additions or corrections, please email them to me:
d.c.pattern [at] hud.ac.uk
CODI 2005 – Day Three (pm)
Planning for Hardware: It Doesn’t Have to be Hard (Tim Hyde – tim.hyde@sirsidynix.com)
Tim’s presentation covered a lot of the same ground that Jolynn’s Planning for 8.0 and 4.2 did. In fact Tim’s session was really a summary of what many of us had seen throughout the 3 days. As one of the final CODI sessions it was ideal – we didn’t want any new shocks or dropping of bombshells 🙂
Tim started off by summarising the Horizon 8, and listed the main new features as:
- state-of-the-art uPortal
- record ownership
- agency modelling
- support for native open SQL databases (Oracle, DB2, MS SQL)
- full Unicode support
- total Java/J2EE solution
- e-commerce
- UniMARC, MARC21, MARCXML…
- LDAP
- Kerberos encryption
- Shibboleth
- thin client (can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux)
Tim also shed some more light on the lack of Sybase in that list of databases: apparently Sybase isn’t 100% Unicode compliant so, until Sybase resolve that, SirsiDynix won’t certify it for use with Horizon 8.0.
For those of you who are thinking about running HIP 4.0 or the Horizon 8.0 application server under Windows 2003, you need to be aware that Microsoft currently limits the Java Virtual Machine to using a maximum of 2GB RAM. In other words, if you load your hardware up with 8 GB of RAM, then HIP/Horizon ain’t going to use it all!
The official hardware recommendations won’t be available until the end of Jan 2006. However, the unofficial word is that if your current hardware is recent, isn’t being stressed out by running Horizon 7.x, and (ideally) has some room for expansion (e.g. extra CPUs or extra memory), then that chances are that it will be suitable for running Horizon 8.0.
For small to medium sized libraries, you should be able to run the application and database servers on the same box, but large libraries should look to run them on separate servers. Every session I’ve been to where that has been stated, a hand has always gone up and someone has said “can you define what you mean by small, medium and large?”…
Yeah – a medium sized library is one that’s smaller than a large one, but bigger than a small one.
(paraphrasing Tim Hyde, SirsiDynix)
Finally, clustering options won’t be available until the release of Horizon 8.1 (Q2/Q3 2006).
CODI 2005 – Day Three (am)
Insights into Web Reporter and NarrowCast (Eileen Kontrovitz & Brian Rawlings)
Wonderful product, but the roll-out hasn’t been the best!
(Brian Rawlings, Alpha G)
Optional components (add on services) for Web Reporter…
- OLAP – used for data mining:
- report objects – include items included in the SQL but not included in the report (e.g. correct sorting by “reconst” fields such as title or call/class number)
- view filters – includes items in the SQL Query but filters the results displayed in the report
- derived metrics – create a new metric on the fly based on existing metrics on the report
- …who benefits? – sites with large databases will benefit the most, as well as people creating “what if?” reports
- consider purchasing OLAP only for the administrator
- Report Services:
- Crystal Reports type interface that can draw data from multiple grids
- useful for creating letter-type output (e.g. invoice notice letters)
- …who benefits? – schools, home services, anyone wanting to create form letters
- in the future, larger number of Report Services documents will be created in future metadata releases
- not every user needs Report Services
- Narrowcast:
- pro-active, automated report delivery
- reports can be sent to email, files, printers, or SMS devices (text messaging)
- …who benefits? – everyone!
- Narrowcast users are cheaper – you may have plenty already
- savings – you can enter multiple email addresses for the same user
[Narrowcast] is the most exciting part of Web Reporter
(Brian Rawlings, Alpha G)
Brian’s general recommendations:
- buy as few users as possible
- buy analysts licenses rather than reporter licenses
- compliance is based on the number of logins created
- enable add-on services for individual users as needed
General MetaData rule: when including item attributes, look for them first in the request, circ, circ_history, burb, and burb_history folders
Narrowcast automation can…
1) save you and your staff money and time:
- automate report delivery
- notices (inc. pre-overdue)
- newsletters
- performance based alerts
2) deliver reports to a fixed group of people, or a dynamic group of people on a specified schedule
3) deliver any type of email notice:
- dynamic subscription, dynamic content
- hold notices, pre-overdues, overdue, billing, etc
- html formatted email, text completely customisable
- queries database for notice conditions, updates records after sending email
- needs a few custom attributes if using MSTR 7.5.0
Narrowcast can keep a copy of emails sent, or it can write to the Horizon database to write a block.
Narrowcast Newsletters:
- email newsletters and event calendars
- keep your patrons informed of library events
Narrowcast can sent performance based alerts – e.g. alert me when Day End did not run